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        Arimaa >> Site Discussion >> Timer misbehaving - Lost 4 minutes!
        
(Message started by: rick on Aug 27^th, 2005, 10:02pm)

Title: Timer misbehaving - Lost 4 minutes!
Post by rick on Aug 27^th, 2005, 10:02pm

In one of my three games today I'm pretty sure I suddenly lost about 4 minutes of my reserve time.

In other words, my opponent made a move in reasonable time (1min - 2min) and then when I saw the move my timer was registering as if I had already been thinking for about 4 minutes already!

I'm pretty sure it was game 18846 but I can't remember where as I was too busy thinking about my move.

Could you please check this out Omar? Since we can't see clock time on review :) (yet) I can't check it out myself.

Does the database record the chat that goes with the game at the bottom of the screen? I mentioned it in the chat at the time.

Rick

Title: Re: Timer misbehaving - Lost 4 minutes!
Post by Adanac on Aug 28^th, 2005, 7:47am

This also happened to me twice yesterday. In my game against Sylvain, the timer claimed that I used over 4 minutes on move #10. I nearly ran out of time, but I'm sure I only used about twenty or thirty seconds on that particular move and I had a full 5 minutes prior to that (it was a 30 second per move game). I am absolutely positively convinced that there was a clock malfunction of some sort.

There was a second game where I believe that happened, but I'm not 100% sure. I lost in about 20 moves on time yesterday (I would have been defeated by a rabbit goal a few moves later so it's no big deal) but I didn't have much time pressure throughout the game and then suddenly I checked my clock and I was just about to run out of time. I'm not 100% sure of this second instance, and it may possibly have been brain freeze on my part where I lost track of the time and didn't hear a warning timer.

Title: Re: Timer misbehaving - Lost 4 minutes!
Post by Fritzlein on Aug 28^th, 2005, 8:46am

on 08/28/05 at 07:47:26, Adanac wrote:

There was a second game where I believe that happened, but I'm not 100% sure. I lost in about 20 moves on time yesterday (I would have been defeated by a rabbit goal a few moves later so it's no big deal) but I didn't have much time pressure throughout the game and then suddenly I checked my clock and I was just about to run out of time.

You are right. You still had time left in your reserve, and when it became your turn, you didn't even get your 15 seconds (never mind your reserve time) to think. I had convinced myself that I wasn't paying attention to the time, but with all the other timeouts that have been occurring, it's clear my initial impression was correct. I'll remove that game from the lightning tournament standings so we can replay it. I wasn't winning by that much, and you had plenty of chance to come back and/or at least get a reasonable number of tiebreak points.

Title: Re: Timer misbehaving - Lost 4 minutes!
Post by omar on Aug 29^th, 2005, 2:32pm

Thanks for reporting this guys. Off hand Im not sure what is causing this. I'll have to investigate it.

Title: Re: Timer misbehaving - Lost 4 minutes!
Post by omar on Aug 29^th, 2005, 3:59pm

I didn't see anything strange in the event log for game 18846, but the event log for game 18840 has a big time gap in it.

1125180415 [Sat Aug 27 22:06:55 2005] move 17w received from w
1125180428 [Sat Aug 27 22:07:08 2005] move 17b received from b
1125180502 [Sat Aug 27 22:08:22 2005] move 18w received from w
1125180605 [Sat Aug 27 22:10:05 2005] move 18b received from b
1125181046 [Sat Aug 27 22:17:26 2005] move 19w received from w
1125181114 [Sat Aug 27 22:18:34 2005] move 19b received from b
1125181247 [Sat Aug 27 22:20:47 2005] move 20w received from w

Between move 18b and 19w looks like almost 7 and a half minutes elasped.

On the 10th minute of every hour the system syncs it time with that of a remote time server (time-a.nist.gov). But it looks like in this case it some how got the wrong time back. Im not sure why that happened. But it does explain what Rick and Greg were seeing.

Title: Re: Timer misbehaving - Lost 4 minutes!
Post by Janzert on Aug 29^th, 2005, 9:16pm

Maybe the server needs to go to a full ntp deamon instead of just syncing with ntpdate or whatever it's using.

Also whichever way it goes it should probably sync with a couple of different ntp servers. A list of public servers can be found at http://ntp.isc.org/bin/view/Servers/WebHome

Janzert

Title: Re: Timer misbehaving - Lost 4 minutes!
Post by 99of9 on Aug 30^th, 2005, 2:26am

Maybe you could make a rule that it never syncs during a game?
I know this is probably horribly complicated, but I think it's quite important for bots since if you ever change by more than a few seconds, a bot could well time out (as could a human i suppose - but s/he should see the change in the interface, so at least gets warning).